Rendering Infrastructure
Contents
Under Construction
This will be a design document which describes the major features (and likely the non-features or anti-features) of a rendering infrastructure which allows VTK-m to function as a standalone library which can output images. Given that algorithms like ray casting and volume rendering can be highly data-parallel and are being implemented using VTK-m algorithms, it makes sense to hook these up to a basic infrastructure which can output these results.
(Note that this will start as a description of the EAVL rendering infrastructure, but will evolve to a VTK-m specific design, which can then be implemented as a modification of EAVL's.)
Goals
Implementation Considerations
Compilation
Anything potentially OpenGL- or Mesa-dependent must be defined in header files only. We do not want to deal with mangling, or multiple-linkage issues in or required by our library.
Fonts
No explicit third-party dependencies means any annotation must be self-contained. Initially, this means bitmap fonts. For EAVL, I used Liberation 2.0 fonts. These are licensed under the SIL Open Font License. The former 1.x series Liberation fonts have licensing problems. In particular, EAVL contains Liberation 2 Mono, Sans, and Serif as bitmap fonts along with spacing metrics. For the ASCII character set, these files take 500KB each as source, and 160KB as object files.
